Candy Crush developer acquires Singapore’s Nonstop Games for $6M cash, employees get $10M

Singapore-based Heroes of Honor developer Nonstop Games has just been acquired by King of Candy Crush Saga fame. King handed over US$6 million in cash upfront, and could pay up to US$84 million over a four-year period subject to meeting revenue targets. Certain Nonstop Games employees also received US$10 million upfront in total, in exchange for working at King for a year following the acquisition date.

The details were revealed in a financial report released on King’s website. King also stated that US$16 million of the US$84 million in contingent consideration it had planned for Nonstop games could be secured through the continued employment of certain Nonstop Games employees, regardless of revenue targets set for the studio.

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King sees this acquisition as a way to add new games “outside of its traditional casual genre”—the Candy Crush Saga and assorted spin-offs we all know so well. It wrote that the studio will focus on “new genre titles”. Nonstop Games will remain based in Singapore, and will continue working on games that are expected to launch next year.

CEO and co-founder Juha Paananen also announced the deal in a blog post, and wrote that the studio would continue to operate Heroes of Honor.

Panaanen stated that the Singapore-based studio had discovered similarities in King and Nonstop while talking to old friends, King’s CEO and CCO. He wrote that “both Nonstop Games and King value teams with high level[s] of independence, are passionate about creating games, and encourage individuality.”

As the talks progressed we felt that King would be the natural home for Nonstop Games and would help us reach our ambitions of creating global games, so we’re now taking the next big leap with King.

Paananen, along with co-founders Teemu Ikonen, Henric Suuronen, and Henrik Karlström founded Nonstop Games first as a studio called Gamesmademe. This was back in 2011. The team initially worked together from different locations before realizing that it needed to stay together in order to progress.

Its first choice for relocation? Singapore. Paananen shared that the founders thought it an “ideal place to combine the best of advanced Asian game mechanics with easily approachable themes and gameplay of Western games.” The team then expanded to include individuals from the region.

In 2013, it raised a $2.9 million seed round led by Creandum and Lifeline Ventures, which allowed it to continue building its first and presently only game, Heroes of Honor.

(See: Nonstop Games raises $2.5 million, makes Singapore home)

The acquisition deal by King is an interesting one, considering Nonstop Games has just one game in its portfolio. A real-time city-management strategy game in a similar vein to Clash of Clans, Heroes of Honor was launched in January this year. However, the game does set itself apart from the thousands of other clones flooding the market in one aspect: your heroes do battle in real time and not asynchronously.